The Burden of Benevolence

This chapter examines the way the humanitarian fable teaches affluent people in the global North that they must exert the will to care for distant, different, suffering strangers. Rather than recognizing global material interdependence, prominent arguments for aid, such as Peter Singer’s initiative, The Life You Can Save, echo the colonial “white man’s burden.” The chapter examines the way humanitarian organizations evoke in viewers a sense of guilt for their fortune in an unequal world and the shame of not doing enough. By directing affluent people in the North away from understanding how they may be implicated or complicit in the systems that create global inequality, the humanitarian fable functions to perpetuate this inequality. Drawing upon examples of humanitarian marketing appeals and life narratives, the chapter argues that humanitarianism provides a means of performing white benevolence.